When he spoke, it was only by indirection, he’d always been my philosopher, it was on his account that I always came down to Stocket from Altensam, the idea of thinking came to me in my first hesitant, then determined encounters with this man who’d always been my highest authority, my philosopher who had taught me to think, most unobtrusively, at first, but from the first with a decided firmness that endured. I’m no philosopher, he’d always said. He had a preference for old clothes, early rising, and washing in cold water. He placed Novalis above everything. Nature, not yet polluted by human beings, hence his early rising. A minimal breakfast, thick socks his sister had knitted from raw, untreated wool, and one of Novalis’s ideas. Time was to him only a means toward the constant study of time. Must I be with another person? he always answered: no, I need be with no other person. This question and this answer of his do more to explain his character than mine, so Roithamer. We admire a man like my uncle, who killed himself because he could no longer endure the unhappiness of mankind, as he wrote on the slip of paper they found in his coat pocket, dated by him on the day he threw himself down the air shaft of the cheese factory, because he’s ahead of us in having the capacity to commit suicide, not only to talk about committing suicide but to commit suicide in fact, so Roithamer. It’s always those upon whom we’d hung our hopes, so Roithamer, who kill themselves, those whose talent and personality we loved and whose presence was the most pleasing and most familiar to us, so Roithamer. Then: I often woke up in the night and asked myself, how high are the costs of building, actually? what if the costs of building the Cone exceed my means, on the one hand exceeding my financial means, on the other hand exceeding my intellectual means? How often I came unrecognized to Austria and to Altensam and stayed in the Kobernausser forest, in the wooden shack I put up myself on the spot I’d picked out as the site for the Cone, in the precise center of the Kobernausser forest, so Roithamer. And very often I came from England to Altensam, unrecognized, and into the Kobernausser forest and stayed there, at its very center, for days and once even for weeks, totally concentrated on the Cone and then went back just as unrecognized to England, to Cambridge. Several times, “several times” underlined, I started to write a letter to my sister, but I never finished writing those letters because I had to keep the Cone a secret from my sister, of course, and if I did drop a hint to her, and I had in fact dropped a hint several times, she’d think I was crazy, even my beloved sister thought I was crazy, so Roithamer, which is why I had to keep silent always about the Cone, even toward my sister. The edifice that was to bring me deep gratification but to my sister the highest, the supreme happiness, so Roithamer. Such a letter about the Cone would have been sure to have frightened her. What a lot of ideas go into the making of the Cone, all adding up to the idea of the Cone. He, Roithamer, I can see that now, lived in fear that he might go mad deep inside the Kobernausher forest, on precisely the geometrical centerpoint in the middle of the Kobernausser forest he had himself determined, because he had a bent in that direction, “bent” underlined. Like his sister, he inclined to sudden madness, from sudden overstrain of his whole being, he feared that from overstraining his head he’d suddenly go mad. He’d decided at once on the size of the Cone and on the character of the interior, but he could no longer recall the exact point in time, to pinpoint that moment now, after so many years, “after so many years” underlined, he found impossible. We must remember the onlookers who note our moment of weakness, mental weakness, in so enormous an effort, and use it to kill us, so Roithamer. We must never let up in intensity. Time is realization, idea, despair, and vice versa, so Roithamer. But I mustn’t act exclusively in accordance with my plan and a dead geometry, so Roithamer.